Hollywood Elsewhere

The distinguished, much-admired producer Jeremy Thomas, whose name was synonymous with cinematic edge, daring and sophistication over the last 40 years and who shepherded several Bernardo Bertolucci films from inceptipn to theatrical release, has died in London.

A long battle with cancer, I’m told. The sad news began to circulate late last night, but I was too lazy to post about his departure right away. Thomas was 77 years old.

I was just hanging with Thomas a few days ago by way of Luca Guadagnino‘s Joie de Vivre. (He’s a significant talking head during Part Two.)

Thomas’s finest producing credits include The Shout, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, The Hit, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Crash, the great Sexy Beast, The Dreamers, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method, and Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive. There were many, many others.

Thomas returned to London two weeks ago after spending a month in Los Angeles, saying goodbye to close friends.

Source: “Jeremy was in Los Angeles for an experimental treatment for the cancer that he seemed to have beaten, following surgery five years ago.”

If Peter Farrelly’s film (Amazon/MGM, 11.6) ignites a strong reaction among the Joe and Jane Popcorns inside Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre (the screening starts at at 6 pm)…if it seems to really çonnect with the schmoes then we’ll know that I Play Rocky may in fact become the Odyssey killer.

Lord knows this is what many of us dearly want — we want a well-made, populist, emotionally poignant film to come along and stop The Odyssey from snagging the Best Picture Oscar. Please, God…please allow us to feel some hope in this regard.

Recursive self-improvement is the AI capability that seems to be the most dangerous trigger mechanism of all the potential doomsday scenarios.

Wiki definition: “Recursive self-improvement (RSI) is a hypothesized process in which artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems rewrite their own computer code, causing an intelligence explosion resulting from enhancing their own capabilities and intellectual capacity, theoretically resulting in superintelligence. Numerous attempts at RSI have been made, none so far showing any sign of intelligence explosion or superintelligence.”

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At 7 pm this evening, HE will attend a second-class version of the Venice Film Festival awards ceremony. As I understand it the swells will attended the actual ceremony inside the Sala Grande, and the HE second-class viewing (i.e., for press desperados) will happen inside the Sala Casino.

The show will probably last 90 to 120 minutes…something like that. I’ll be wearing my black Kooples dress shirt for symbolism’s sake.

After the ceremony concludes there will be a 9:30 pm Sala Darsena screening of the Golden Lion winnner. There will also be screenings of the Grand Prix winner, the Armani Beauty Audience Award, and the Best Director Award winner.

There’s a nhalf-decent chance that Lance Oppenheim‘s Primetime, a movie that I almost hate because it’s been so difficult to get a reservation to see here, will win one of the top awards. 1:05 am update: WRONG!

“”Terrorism should only be used in quotes because it’s emotionally and politically loaded”…really?

HE-posted two days ago (Thursday, 9.10) in comment thread for “Subdued, Muted “NAZA” Underwhelms“:

“Perhaps I shouldn’t refer to the slaughter of Gaza (which every humane person has deplored from the get-go) as a “genocide.” This is arguably antisemitic slander.

“We all despise Netanyahu and the murder and destruction he’s caused, but what has gone on in Gaza is not a genocide, for Chrissake. This movement to equate Israel with the Nazis is sick.

“Why haven’t I pushed back more vigorously? Because I fear that the rabid, foam-at-the-mouth anti-Israel community will shriek and howl like Allen Ginsberg, and then step on me like a bug.

“The New Anti-Israel Left has lost perspective, has lost its moral bearings, kinda lost its mind. That 24-minute standing ovation for NAZA in Venice earlier today struck me as excessive. We’re talking about smug hypocritical fucks who couldn’t give two actual fucks about the ‘Palestinians’.”

I’ve always been of two minds about the 9/11 horror, particularly regarding the jumpers. On one hand I understand the feelings of people who don’t want to consider things too vividly; on the other I think it’s fundamentally wrong to heavily edit or smother the reality of what happened, at least for those who might want to go there.

One year after the 9/11 attacks I posted a shot of a jumper — not a little spider-like stick figure but a guy with discernible features — who had leapt out of the WTC North Tower and was apparently picking up velocity fast. Later that day a big-name critic wrote and said I’d crossed a line. I told her I strongly disagreed, and that I think it’s obscene for the MSM to delete the ghastly images.

Posted on 9.9.11: “I’ll be appalled for the rest of my life that my Reel.com editor (whose name I’m not going to mention) chose to summarize the column that I wrote from the Toronto Film Festival on the evening of 9.11.01 as follows: “Jeffrey Wells reports on the toll that current events have had on the Toronto Film Festival, and tries to muster enthusiasm for films that have screened, including Lantana, Monsoon Wedding, and Last Orders.”

“This was back in the day when entertainment websites wrote about and/or acknowledged only entertainment subjects…even if the horrible death of nearly 3000 people from jumping or flames or being crushed had led to a major film festival deciding to halt its various programs to show respect and take a breather.

“Even then, Reel.com felt that it was better to not be too specific (don’t want to encourage people to not think about movies!) and to refer to this slaughter as ‘current events.’ Thank God that mentality has been entirely rubbed out on the web.”

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CBS This Morning‘s Gayle King: “Was the [Clancy juror] of color a woman or a man?”

Clancy juror Paula Devlin: “A man.”

King: “A man. Is…is the holdout juror a person of…a black man?”

Devlin: “Yes.”

King: “A black man is the holdout juror?”

Devlin: “Yes.”

King: “Well, I have to sit with that for just a second.”

This only serves to prove that the divisions created between us are artificial when it comes to things that really count. https://t.co/aXdgELXhRF

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) September 11, 2026

Friendo: “Black guy lol.”

Jeffrey Wells: “Yes!! I love it!! But why do I love it?

Friendo: “It’s just funny that a black juror stood against nine liberal women and two other guys.”

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First, I’m instinctually hating any film called Hope. (Roughly the same as calling a film Happy-Happy or Optimism or Rainbow’s End or Bowl of Cherries…get outta my life.) Second, bizarre monsters preying on a small town with only a few well-armed intrepids fighting back…tired, tedious. Third, why would any self-respecting South Korean chamber of commerce call their town Hope Harbor? (Hope translates as hui-mang and harbor translates as hang-gu.) Fourth, I’m instinctually hating any South Korean monster film that costars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander…obviously an opportunistic paycheck gig. Fifth, the monster looks arbitrary, perverse, stupid.

Directed by Rory Kennedy (Last Days in Vietnam), The Trial of Alex Baldwin premiered at DOC NYC ten months ago (11.13.25) Abramorama will open the doc on 10.1.26. How can it be anything more than a concise recap?

A new trailer for Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden (Neon, 11.25) popped an hour ago…

In this serene, deeply spiritual chick flick that isn’t, surprisingly, a lesbo thing, a harried, in some ways embattled director of a nursing home in the Parisian suburbs named Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) has been attempting to institute a humane care technique known as Humanitude, in spite of bureaucratic resistance and general nursing-staff recalcitrance.

But then she happens to engage one evening with Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese playwright-director, and boy, do they strike up a long conversation about end-of-life care and facing death! They talk and share for hours on end, not just into the night but into the pre-dawn hours and beyond.

And then they fly to Kyoto together and talk a lot more as well as explore the joyful art of foot massage (no lezzy stuff — just feet), and then they fly back to Paris for more talk and caring and well-massaged peds all around. And then (non-spoiler!) Okamoto’s character finally, inevitably gives up the ghost.

And there’s a Big Lebowski-like scene in which two of Morisaki’s nearest and dearest (a 70ish stage actor, played by Kyōzō Nagatsuka, and a developmentally disabled teenaged kid who yelps like a hyena when emotionally aroused) sprinkle her ashes from a pretty Kyoto mountaintop. Do they suffer the indignity of windblown ashes flying into their faces a la Jeff Bridges‘ Jeff Lebowski? Of course not — this isn’t that kind of film.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t suffer all that much through All of a Sudden. Well, I did to a certain extent (as did several viewers who bailed out of Friday afternoon’s press screening inside the Salle Bazin), but I was so impressed — amazed, really — at Hamaguchi’s audacity.

His bold-as-brass decision, I mean, to make a 197-minute film that is basically a slow-moving, didactic conversational instructional — a 21st Century counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard‘s Marxist instructional films (1967 to 1974) — that completely ignores pretty much all of the dramatic basics — no plot, no character arcs, no story tension, no second-act pivots, no third-act payoffs or dramatic surprises — but at the same time heavily invests in creating spiritual flotation vibes that are kind of catching and make you feel…well, settled and serene.

When my life eventually comes to an end, I would like this transitional passage to occur within a Marie-Lou-styled environment…seriously. I would probably decline offers of foot-and-toe massages but otherwise, cool. Let no one claim that All of a Sudden isn’t a nicely persuasive bit of pro-Humanitude propaganda.

Everyone gets and gives foot massages in this thing, and you can bet I was saying to myself “thank God Hamaguchi insisted on everyone receiving perfect pedicures before the cameras rolled….thank God Almighty for that.”

For what it’s worth sitting through Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling last year was a much more uncomfortable experience.